# SmartScan: An approach to detect Denial of Service Vulnerability in Ethereum Smart Contracts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.02852 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02852/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 6 May 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Vulnerability Detection in Ethereum Smart Contracts via Machine Learning: A Qualitative Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18639/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Blockchain technology (BT) Ethereum Smart Contracts allows programmable transactions that involve the transfer of monetary assets among peers on a BT network independent of a central authorizing agency. Ethereum Smart Contracts are programs that are deployed as decentralized applications, having the building blocks of the blockchain consensus protocol. This technology enables consumers to make agreements in a transparent and conflict-free environment. However, the security vulnerabilities within these smart contracts are a potential threat to the applications and their consumers and have shown in the past to cause huge financial losses. In this paper, we propose a framework that combines static and dynamic analysis to detect Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerability due to an unexpected revert in Ethereum Smart Contracts. Our framework, SmartScan, statically scans smart contracts under test (SCUTs) to identify patterns that are potentially vulnerable in these SCUTs and then uses dynamic analysis to precisely confirm their exploitability of the DoS-Unexpected Revert vulnerability, thus achieving increased performance and more precise results. We evaluated SmartScan on a set of 500 smart contracts collected from the Etherscan. Our approach shows an improvement in precision and recall when compared to available state-of-the-art techniques.